The Braid I Learned for My Wife

Again

We did it again. And again. Peg stood beside me in her black smock with her short silver hair, and when my hands went the wrong way she put her hands over mine and moved them where they belonged.

“Feel that? Feel where your thumb goes? That’s it. You hold it with your fingers, not your fist.”

My fingers do not do small things well. I can lay a weld so clean you would think a machine did it, but I could not keep three hanks of hair in order for more than four crossings. My forearms ached in a way they do not ache after ten hours in the shop.

“You’re overthinking it,” Carrie said to me in the mirror. “Stop looking at your hands. Feel it.”

“You’ve been doing this since you were seven.”

“Six,” she said, and smiled at me in the glass.

Peg had me take it out and start over seven times. The eighth time, I got all the way to the bottom. Peg handed me a hair tie and I wrapped it on, twice, the way I had seen Carrie do a thousand times without looking.

It was not a good braid. It was loose at the top and tight in the middle, and it wandered off to the left near the bottom like it had somewhere else to be. But it was a braid. It was down my wife’s back, and I had made it.

Carrie turned her head to look at it in the hand mirror Peg held up for her. She did not say anything for a while. Her cane was leaning against the arm of the chair. She reached back with her left hand and touched the end of it.

“It’s crooked,” she said.

“I know.”

“I love it,” she said, and looked at me in the big mirror, and that is the look I will see when I am dying.

The money

I reached for my wallet. Peg saw me do it and put her hand flat on the counter between us.

“No,” she said.

“Peg, you stayed after close. You washed her hair. You spent two hours on me.”

“I’ve been doing this girl’s hair since she was seventeen years old and wearing a dress the color of a lime popsicle to the prom,” Peg said. “I am not charging her husband to learn it. Put that away before I’m insulted.”

“At least let me pay for the wash.”

“Matt.” She looked at me over her glasses. “You bring her in every Saturday at two and I’ll wash it and you’ll braid it until you can do it without me. That’s what it costs. Now get her home before she wears out.”

I put the wallet away. Out in the truck, Carrie leaned her head against the window, and the braid was there over her shoulder, crooked at the end, and she fell asleep before we got to the edge of town.

Mornings

I set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier that Monday. Carrie sat on the closed lid of the toilet in our bathroom and I stood behind her with the brush and the three sections, and I said it under my breath like a prayer. Right over middle. Left over middle.

It took me twenty-two minutes the first morning. I was almost late to work. The braid was terrible.

Tuesday it took eighteen. Wednesday, sixteen. By the end of that first week I was down to twelve minutes, and the braid had stopped wandering off to the left, mostly. It still went crooked at the very end, where the hair gets thin and there is less to hold on to.

Carrie said she did not care. I did. I would come home from work and look at it and see exactly where I had lost my tension, the way I can look at a weld and see where my hand wavered.

Wednesday came and went and I did not call Tonya.